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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/27937332">There is an art to being left behind</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/faceofstone/pseuds/faceofstone'>faceofstone</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Twin Peaks</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Albert Rosenfield - freeform, Blue Rose critical, Bonds, Buenos Aires, Dale Cooper - freeform, Established Relationship, Gen, Phillip Jeffries - freeform, Red Room (Twin Peaks), contemporary</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-12-24</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-12-24</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-10 22:13:54</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>General Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>2,370</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/27937332</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/faceofstone/pseuds/faceofstone</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>Chet and Sam in Buenos Aires, holding a grip on a mutable present.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Chet Desmond/Sam Stanley</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>5</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>16</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Collections:</b></td><td>Yuletide 2020</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>There is an art to being left behind</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><ul class="associations">
      <li>For <a href="https://archiveofourown.org/users/bold_seer/gifts">bold_seer</a>.</li>



    </ul><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>I wish you the merriest of Yuletides, dear recipient!</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>It always came back to this: Chester Desmond holding up the jade ring like a champion’s belt to the indifference of his public, which was a sea of red curtains in all directions and the maws of a chevron floor under his shoes. He had been looking for this moment. It was not meant to taste like failure.</p><p>Time passed, twisted and looped and remained still. Nobody came for him. There was a phone in the room, an old rotary dial model on a lacquered coffee table next to the curtains, and nobody called. The air of that place weighed down his lungs like concrete. Chet knelt down, keeping the ring safe and cold in the palm of his hand, and grabbed a hem of thick red velvet to raise it and peek underneath. The fabric was soft in his hands and heavy beyond belief; eventually he bent it around a corner, like steel, and like steel it remained bent, enough for him to lie down on his back and slip his head through the fissure he’d opened.</p><p> </p><p>Beyond the curtains was a vast darkness. A figure rested in mid-air.</p><p>“Phillip Jeffries,” he said through the weight that had built up in his chest, a raspy whisper filled with sleek pride. He had found the ring and he had found Phillip Jeffries, floating face-down in the middle of a darkened space, arms and legs open like a starfish in a cloud of smoke that ebbed and flowed with his breath, shedding his humanity like old skin. Then and there, it was the least surprising thing in the world.</p><p>“You can’t do that, Chet,” said his former boss with a drawn-out, long-suffering slant in his voice. He’d told him the same thing a hundred times before – you can’t turn it in blank, Chet. You can’t do away with a desk, Chet. You can’t just peek underneath the curtains, Chet. Echoes. Felt like that was all that place was.</p><p>“Get lost,” Phil added. It had an air of finality.</p><p>“But I..." said Chet, and if he spoke any slower it'd start going backwards. "...found... the ring.”</p><p>“That’s sweet of you. Now play nice and tell me... this ring you found, what does it mean?”</p><p>Words were too heavy to sustain that kind of answer without cracking, but he was Blue Rose, top marks, so he slipped a hand through the bent steel curtain and cupped his right ear as an answer. The gesture came easy, elegant, foreordained. This place liked symbols.</p><p>But Phil kept staring at him, gaze as fixed as an insect’s. “That is all it is for you?” Secrets and child’s games in the face of eternal void.</p><p>A sigh took all the smoke out of him, filling the expanse, taking all space and all time out of it, this place that could not be seen anymore was at once lined with curtains, a motel room, deep space dotted with distant stars. Phil breathed back in and the ring’s gold band glimmered on his finger. Chet’s hand was empty.</p><p>“Have some respect. Go home, Chet.”</p><p> </p><p>It got fuzzy, after that. He searched for home, a detective’s search, clean and thorough, but there was no home, only a door with green paint peeling off and broken glass outside the window, and…</p><p> </p><p>Chet woke up in the darkness. Some godforsaken mechanical alarm was ringing. He pulled his pillow over his ears and grunted, half because of the shrill assault on his ears, half because the other half of the bed was empty: early bird Sam, light sleeper that he was, had already sprung out of bed to check the offending gizmo. Not that Chet would be much help, so he stayed in bed, keeping the blankets warm for the two of them. He’d long made his peace with the thicket of assorted Rube-Goldberg machines that filled every inch of the shelves of their apartment, with their webs and antlers and opalescent fluids and a museum’s worth of analog and digital displays tracking who knew what. Sam built them and Sam put them there, Chet was not going to touch them as long as they did not touch him, that was just the way of things. Once he got his coffee, he would consider whether the fact that one of them burst into an unhinged jangle counted as a breach of that armistice.</p><p> </p><p>“Chet,” called Sam under his breath. “Chet, it was the red dots black box.”</p><p>At the news, Chet stood up against the headboard, trying to adjust his eyes to the deep of the night. The row of apartment blocks across the street covered the moon. Far beneath the window, lampposts and ads flickered over the deserted street. Clouds gathered, carrying mysteries of their own. A cat yowled. Their life unfolded in between, in the darkness. Chet settled for imagining Sam’s shape existing in the flat, at ease in his prim pajamas, which was a good thought. He slicked back his hair.</p><p>“How urgent, babe?”</p><p>“… red dots black box urgent,” answered Sam after a brief consideration. That is to say, the urgency of the unknown, as they never did figure out what that contraption abandoned underneath the city outskirts was, let alone what it did. Sam had picked up on a certain type of electrical residue whenever the red dots lit up and built a small detector, which they had hidden in the tunnels near the box, and which had just lit up like a Christmas tree.</p><p>“Let’s go, then.”</p><p>Sleep was for the weak and for men in their late fifties, after all, and they only belonged to the latter category.</p><p> </p><p>As they got dressed (embroidered suede jacket the one, long loose scarf over polka-dotted shirt the other, ever the tourists in this city), they shared a few words. Not too many. But it felt like a good time to point out, at the cost of breaking their routine of comfortable silence, that chasing after these things always felt like relapsing. Of course, someone had to track them down. Their distant training had taught them so, despite the piles of wasted lives those searches caused and the pointed uselessness of all results, the opposite of value, you’d think people would learn but no, old manuals and regulations still guided them. Maybe all of this was just old habits, and the fuckers famously die hard (<em>their</em> old habits, and they had managed not to die either, there may have been some pride to be found in that). But even casting aside all the shadows of the blue rose, there remained the simple truth that someone had to observe reality as it unfolded. Someone had to record its swirls and eddies. They owed this to the world they lived in, somehow.</p><p> </p><p>They drove inland for half an hour, crossing bursts of bright night life and diving into the darkness again.</p><p>“This city doesn’t ever get tired of its tunnels,” mused Chet as they left their car parked on the side of the street. In front of them stood the graffiti’d brick arches of an abandoned mansion; further inside, past a corridor and into a room dominated by an incongruous spiral staircase, lay the tunnels, pushing back toward the city, toward the underground labyrinths of San Telmo and the collapsed, unfinished Jesuit network between the city’s churches.</p><p>“Semiotics,” said Sam, but failed, or did not bother, to line up the rest of his thoughts on the matter and let the topic fade back into silence. What was the point of talking about labyrinths, anyway, when all their days were deep in their own Knossos, carving out a cozy corner in a dead end as minotaurs roamed the halls.</p><p> </p><p>The next thing he said was: “It’s gone.”</p><p>Not their detector, which still lay hidden in a stack of moldy documents, nor a low clay bowl which seemed likewise untouched, but in the clay bowl, where the black box used to lay, now was only a small metal nugget.</p><p>“And that’s that on that? You’re better than this, Stanley.”</p><p>“<em>My lab</em> is better than this.” With all due care, he slipped the nugget into a plastic envelope and pocketed it. “I would rather like to know what this is made of and believe me, I will. But any way of understanding the connections we suspected? Poof. All gone, Chet. All gone.”</p><p>They did not understand much of it all when the black box was still there, either, so at least the blasted contraption had coherence going for it. All they could trace was a maze of encrypted signals reaching out through the ether, carrying hermetic messages to unknown recipients, and behind every one of those loomed hints of the same impossible name: Dale Cooper.</p><p> </p><p>“Maybe we were wrong,” mused Sam as they crawled back the way they came, through the tunnels, the staircase, the corridor, at last outside again. The sky was still dark, but people were beginning to liven up the streets. The two of them rested against the mansion’s brick wall. “You know? It’s so easy to be wrong.”</p><p>“Maybe it went the way of Dale Cooper.”</p><p>“After twenty-five years?”</p><p>“You never know how these things go. Take me. I missed out on a few good years of fun and yet... here I am.”</p><p>Sam shook his head. “He would not have called them ‘fun’.”</p><p>“What?”</p><p>“Agent Cooper. The years he missed. He had an emptiness in his eyes… and I mean what I said, I really mean what I said. The emptiness was his, it was not for show.”</p><p>Chet pondered this information. “What do you know, you’re right. He did. Like Phil… and now I’m nostalgic. Yes, people like that don’t come back, I suppose. They don’t even leave their boxes behind.”</p><p>They were about to get their butts off that wall and back in the car when Sam froze.</p><p>“Chet.”</p><p>“Babe?”</p><p>“Don’t look at me.”</p><p>The reason for that warning became evident before Chet could ask what was going on: the people in the street, young and old, workers and drunkards and insomniacs all, were, in that moment, Dale Cooper, from the hem of his impeccable black suit to the topmost lock of gelled-back hair, older now, like they had grown old since they last saw him. The people did not seem to notice. They went about their way, greeted each other, stopped by to tie their shoes. Chet and Sam could not afford to see each other that way. It was a good call, not to look, not to fix that moment into a certainty. They reached out for each other’s hand. Sam fiddled with the flowers embroidered on the sleeve of Chet’s suede jacket, what he knew without looking was a bright gaudy thing and not in any way Bureau-mandated black, nevermore. It felt like good cotton lined with the occasional metallic polyester thread. He tried to count the stitches just by feeling them out with his thumb and emptied his head of all other thoughts.</p><p> </p><p>Then, as sudden as it had descended upon the street, the portent left and that corner of the world resumed business as usual, with its regular share of oddities and happenstance.</p><p>“You know, Chet. I never got to see the task force manuals. Never made it that far. But that? That was an omen.”</p><p>“Shit, it sure was.”</p><p>But there was no point in asking what it might have been an omen of. They didn’t teach that in Blue Rose.</p><p> </p><p>It was moving away. Maybe Chet could drive them to follow the... phenomenon, for lack of a better word, through Mataderos, Villa Luros and all the way downtown until they got lost in a sea of Coopers and, in a daze, joined their ranks themselves. Maybe the smart thing to do would have been to have Sam track it with his gizmos, from his lab, like he followed so many steps toward all sorts of knowledge throughout the years since Chet found him passed out and rambling about absent angels, past a door with green paint peeling off and broken glass outside the window. Oh, he knew his Sam could pull it off. Pull <em>something</em> off, at least. If Chet’s forays into the unknown had been fueled by misguided pride – which he’s not saying they were, but maybe that recurring dream wasn’t half wrong either, his brain kept going back to it like a bad tooth – Sam was as clean as they got. He followed the science and observed where that lead him and… up yours, Phil, Sam could make it if he wanted to, with Chet guarding his back.</p><p>On the flip side of all this fancy reasoning, Chet concluded to himself as he pulled into Avenida Rivadavia, jostling his way into the familiar, human humdrum of early morning traffic, and squinted against the first rays of the rising sun: what would it all be for?</p><p> </p><p>“I wonder how Albert’s doing these days,” he said instead.</p><p>“Were you reminiscing about the old times, dear?”</p><p>“Maybe.”</p><p>“Counting the people without a void in their eyes and coming up short?”</p><p>“Hey. Keep the bitterness for the top brass, Albert’s alright. Or, he used to be.”</p><p>“Must be lonely, these days.”</p><p>“He’d say that’s just how he likes it. I bet he’s still a poor liar.”</p><p>“Must be lonely, these days.”</p><p>“Alright, Sam. Alright.”</p><p> </p><p>So maybe that was what they would do instead, on that day marked by absences and emptiness and ghosts of a past that had chewed them and spat them out a long time ago with no rhyme nor reason. If they could reach out, in the shadows, outside all official channels, to leave even a single word… once the world ultimately spat out Rosenfield too, because that’s the way it is, at least in Blue Rose, for those who remain, then… fuck, who knew, they could treat him to a steak or something, if he ever felt like visiting. It beat standing alone in a vast darkness, on a chevron floor that stretches forever, and they knew a nice parilla down the street, that had to count for something, had to be good for something. It was good for them.</p>
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